Centred on the Blurred Line Between Artists and Software Developers

Organised by Goto10, Make Art is a festival dedicated to the integration of "free and open source" software in electronic art. Starting the 24th of January 2006, artists and programmers will take the audience on a journey through this emerging culture via concerts, conferences, software presentations, exhibitions and a workshop.

Make Art is centred on the blurred line between artists and software developers. With the emergence of Internet and the democratisation of computers, the general public is more and more often confronted with hybrid software conceived by qualified artists with strange and varied titles: programmer artists, software artists, digital artists, (new)media artists... They conceive their own creative tools or work hand in hand with the software programmers, contrarily to those who commission technicians and other ghost programmers.

If the question of the artist technician isn't a new one, you can now count on the presence, in the midst of this chaotic and creative digital fauna, of certain individuals who take the step of electronic creation consciously accompanied by a political gesture, that of the use of open source software.

Open source software is computer programmes that can be used by all and for all use, and are distributed with their source code, allowing everyone to study, distribute, modify and improve them, without necessarily asking the author (several free licenses exist). On the contrary, the source code for proprietary software is inaccessible, and the proprietary licenses limit the software to a very precise use.

Beyond the purely technical aspect of the open source world, there are a counter culture's social and economical stakes. A culture born of the technological boom that better understands the ins and outs of electronic power struggles in the post-industrial societies.

At a time when intellectual property is fiercely debated, while some people cling on to their little bits of territory, others have chosen to share knowledge, art and collective work.

Make Art constitutes a tool for reflecting on the propagation of free software in artistic creation and we want it to be a view onto the social, political and economic myths and realities linked to this phenomenon.